Casual Hex

Fear of all fears! I rebooted my Mac this morning only to be greeted by a flashing globe icon instead of a login window.

What the heck is that!? *PANIC*

So I google flashing globe icon osx startup to see what’s going on. I quickly discover that my Mac is trying to boot from the network.

Okay.

Why?

No idea.

But, okie. How do I get it to boot from the internal hard drive… like it normally does?

Well, that’s going to be easy. Wrong!!!!!

I try to force my Mac to boot from the hard drive by holding down ‘D’ while its booting.

No luck.

I try holding down ‘C’ to get it to boot from my OS X Tiger DVD… no luck.

I bang and bang and bang on the keyboard and I get a Open Firmware screen. Wooo-aa? Google time.

I end up at a page, courtesy of Andrew J. Brehm, that seems to have information I can use. So I scan through it quickly… and give boot cd:9,\\:tbxi a try. Nothing. I read the document again. Okay, I scan it. I try all sorts of things. I finally get a directory listing of my Tiger DVD. I try boot cd:9,\\:BootX and…

My Mac boots from the DVD!

So, now that I’m booting up from the DVD I can use Startup Manager to politely remind OSX where to boot from next time.

And it’s all good. Maybe. I dunno what caused the switch to Netbooting… and it wasn’t the boogie man or just ‘that darned computer’. So I’m doing volume checks and whatever else I can think of.

But my Mac booted. And really, other than the fact that I’m a total newb whenever something goes wrong on my Mac… it still ends up taking me less time to fix it than I could have possibly dreamed of with Windows.

But what does a one-time MCSE, old PC user of 20+ years PC experience know?

That my Mac rocks.